


You Wear Your Grief Like A Badge

by Not_Crazy_Just_a_Fangirl



Series: Companion Stories - Luthors and Kryptonians [8]
Category: Smallville, Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Clark Kent and Lex Luthor Reconciliation, Gen, Kara Danvers Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-20
Updated: 2019-01-20
Packaged: 2019-10-13 08:45:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17484926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_Crazy_Just_a_Fangirl/pseuds/Not_Crazy_Just_a_Fangirl
Summary: Clark has made plenty of tough decisions. Some good, some bad. He’s the king of had choices it seems like.To tell Lex the truth or keep him in the dark.To be a hero or keep being human.To live a double life.To move to metropolis.So when the traumatized 13 year old lands in Smallville well, there’s some more choices to be made.





	You Wear Your Grief Like A Badge

Clark Kent grows up in Smallville, Kansas. He is the epitome of small town America, All-American farm boy. Strong, polite and blue-eyed. He is one of a handful of his graduating class, of Smallville history, to get out to make something bigger than himself. He goes to Metropolis University, and everyone says Ma and Pa Kent must of done something right to get a boy like him.

But before he was Clark Kent, he was Kal-El. He was a baby who landed in a field outside Smallville along with meteors. On one of the biggest tragedies in Smallville’s history, Martha and Jonathan Kent found a baby in a spaceship, and named him Clark.

They never tell him anything about it. Tell him he’s too strong and fast for sports. To keep quiet about the ways he is special. They don’t tell him why, until he’s fourteen. 

He is fourteen, and fighting the aliens he may well have created when he brought those meteors to earth, intentionally or not. He is an alien, and turns himself into a superhero.

He is a terrible liar, and even worse at keeping his secrets.

This is important. Because Lex Luthor is one of his best friends, and is the first to figure him out. He lies, and Lex knows he is lying. Lex wants to understand. And then Lex wants to help. And instead of distancing himself, Clark becomes one of Lex’s only friends, and lets him think he’s crazy. Gaslights him, lies about what he knows, what Clark knows Lex saw. Let’s Lex think he’s insane, and doomed to become just like his father. Leads Lex down the path he so desperately did not want to fall down. He knows this. Its every comic book origin ever. A villain makes a hero, but a hero makes a villain just the same.

Clark is not a good liar, except when it is too himself. He can convince himself he’s a better secret keeper than he is. Convince himself Lex was walking his path before he ever met him. Convince himself their fallout is not his fault; that if he had told Lex the truth, he would have hated him, dissected him, outed him.

Clark Kent is from Smallville, Kansas, where there are no aliens, no oddities, and boys don’t like boys unless they want to get strung up in a cornfield. Good thing none of those things affect Clark Kent.

So, he moves to Metropolis. Because he can do more good there, he convinces himself. Not because he’s running away from Smallville, from his father’s disappointment in Superman. Superman doesn’t belong in Smallville. Clark Kent wears glasses and hunches his shoulders to seem smaller than he really is. Clark Kent is a reporter for the Daily Planet and works with Lois Lane because he’s the only one who’ll let her bully him without crying or endangering their life by pissing her off. 

Superman’s named is coined by Lois herself. He wears an S on his chest for it too. The S is definitely not a product of what he discovers in his infant self’s spaceship. It is not the crest of a family he never and will never know. Superman barely knows anything of Krypton, so what would Clark Kent know of it.

Not surprisingly at all, it takes less than a year for Lois to figure it out, and its before Clark has figured out she was already attracted to him. He doesn’t try to refute it this time - he knows what madness that way lies.

Clark Kent is twenty-five when another spaceship crashes in Smallville. He’s home for the harvest fest, and he’s making friendly smalltalk with Lex. Because Clark Kent is still friends with Lex Luthor - who was his best friend throughout high school and practically paid his college tuition. Superman is Lex’s enemy. Lex, who thinks Superman might just pose a threat to Earth one day, who might get sick of saving it. Lex, whose been hurt once, and ways Kryptonite around his neck so Clark cannot stand to close. Neither of them acknowledge that Clark flinches and trips whenever Lex stands too near, or claps a hand on his shoulder. An impossibility when Clark is a head taller and a hundred pounds heavier.

They are the first ones to the spaceship, away from anyone else thank God (thank Rao some part of him thinks he should say).

Inside, there is a girl. She is blonde, blue-eyed, and wears Superman’s S on her chest. They discover she is thirteen, her name is Kara Zor-El, and she is looking for her infant cousin Kal-El. 

They take her to the Kent farm, for lack of other options. It is autumn, and she shivers in her dress. Ma Kent piles her with Clark’s old jackets and a mug of cocoa. Clark takes to her in stilted Kryptonian, which she makes at face at, confirming his suspicions that his accent is atrocious. She understands what has happens before Clark can figure out how to word it. She asks him his name, he tells her Clark. She meets his eyes, and tells him, does not ask, that he was born with the name Kal-El. He nods.

She breaks down in sobs in the kitchen. Falls right to the floor. Clark reaches for her, but she runs, faster than he’s ever tried to move before. She comes back an hour later, an eerie calm settled over her bones - a calm before the storm. She is drenched in water and mud. And her hands and palms all the way up her arms are covered in scratches and blood. Clark pales, because she shouldn’t be able to be hurt like that, not if they have the same blood, the same powers. He doesn’t know if its different for girls or if she just hasn’t been here long enough for the powers to take hold - his didn’t come until he was fourteen after all. 

She smiles, and it's terrible in its grief. She holds out green rocks to him, and says, to the best of his understanding, that she has found a piece of home. Ripped them from the earth. The pain is grounding, negating the effect of the yellow sun thrumming in her veins. 

He doesn’t know what to do with her. This girl holding Kryptonite like its precious, who speaks of their powers like a curse rather than a gift. This girl from another planet, half feral with grief and trauma. This girl who is all of thirteen and yet supposedly older than him. 

Clark is barely able to keep his own two lives in order. He doesn’t think he can take care of a whole nother person. An alien. 

She needs people. She needs humans. She needs to learn the lessons he learned and hopefully with a lot less grief and stress. And she doesn’t need false hope. Clark likes being human, he likes earth. He has a ring for Lois practically burning a hole in his pocket. He knows he cannot give her what she needs.

He knows he cannot be the strange girl’s family. 

But maybe he can find her one. It's the least he can do, for blood.

  
  



End file.
